November 05, 2004

OPERATION ELECT BUSH

"Could the Guardian and its Operation Clark County be responsible for a second Bush term?" asks the BBC's Kevin Anderson:

That was one topic round the water cooler today, and it seems we're not the first to think of it.

Just dipping into the Guardian's blog, someone has written in: "Just wanted to thank the Guardian for helping deliver Ohio to Bush. Cheers!"

The results in Clark County? Al Gore won the county by 1% in 2000. John Kerry lost the county by 2%, just shy of 2,000 votes, this time.

Also, as Oliver Kamm points out, the "overall vote change in Ohio was Bush up 1.0%, Kerry up 2.2% on Gore. Clark County therefore had a shift to Bush compared with the state average." In any case, as the originator of The Guardian's idiot plan, I'm pleased to have won the election for Bush. Hey, Karl Rove ... PayPal is on the left.

UPDATE. Slate's Andy Bowers: "Kerry won every Gore county in Ohio except Clark. He even increased Gore's winning margin in 12 of the 16. Nowhere among the Gore counties did more votes move from the blue to the red column than in Clark. The Guardian's Katz was quoted as saying it would be 'self-aggrandizing' to claim Operation Clark County affected the election. Don't be so modest, Ian."

I saw Ian Katz on Sky News this morning. He accused those people who are saying that the Guardian's campaign won it for Bush - he doesn't seem to realize that they're not being totally serious about it - of being "self-aggrandizing".

Take that Blair! Self aggrandizing! Bang to rights, you must admit.

Katz was at least being somewhat self-deprecating, although it looked suspiciously like a re-run of his previous and unconvincing 'Hey, we were just funny guys in the pub having a laugh, we weren't really serious about it' routine.

Presumably the press coverage of the Guardian's "elect bush" campaign in Ohio covered a bigger area than just Clark County. I.e. Ohio voters outside Clark County got to hear of it, so it's not just the Clark county swing to the Republicans that can be attributed to the Guardian.

One item regarding Ohio that hasn't been brought up is the steel tariffs. Many conservatives were opposed to the tariffs and many in the UK were offended by them. But were the tariffs politically astute in that they helped swing Ohio over to Bush?

The tariffs were repealed after the WTO declared them illegal. The Bush administration showed 'good faith' in pushing the tariffs as far as they could.

You think that makes any difference other than as semantics after almost a year, though? People who were already going to vote for Bush a year ago didn't need to be convinced via the steel tariffs. People who only decided to vote for Bush later on likely didn't even remember the whole brouhaha when they made that decision. Besides, Kerry sounded some pretty strong protectionist rhetoric during his campaign, much more so than Bush did.

Now that the election is over, we can see that winning Ohio was critical. With the War on Terrorism the dominant issue for this election, were the tariffs such a terrible transgression if they helped prevent turning the war over to the appeasers?

This reminds me of the scene in Patton where a long military column is held up at a bridge by a stubborn mule. The problem was solved when Patton shot the mule and had it dumped over the side of the bridge. Shooting a mule because it is stubborn isn't nice. But sometimes it's necessary.

Hey Tim - Take a closer gander at your first link in this topic, to the BBC. Seems we gun-totin' Bible-thumpin' ignorami here in the US aren't the ONLY ones who don't know how to properly punctuate "its!" I thought it was just Yanks-who-vote-for-Bush who are stupid.